Please let's not repeat the same flamewar tropes for the ten thousandth time. Whether it's right or wrong, this level of repetition is deeply uninteresting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

the fact that so many capable humans have constructed this orgy of greed which is purely financial, at a time when the global economy actually requires massive definancialization, is of profound interest.

this is a huge distraction, and another way to divide people, and use tricks or marketing to cause them to act out of FOMO and greed.

it would be "interesting" if we were debating how to solve the supply line fragility, the need for soil, the need to keep the temperature down, the need to achieve some modicum of equality here in North America so that millions of intelligent humans dont become slaves and have their potential as inventors and scientists wasted.

who survives all this will not see your comment, probably, but the facile way that you declare these fundamental questions of survival as .... uninteresting ... makes me despair.

The thing to do with those large concerns is to post something interesting about them in their own right—not change a different thread to that subject. If they're as important as you say, there must be plenty of interesting things to discuss.

While the electricity problem does need to be addressed, do not be so quick to lump all blockchain users, advocates, and researchers into a single hideous glob.

There is value to be achieved, I think, in a more nuanced approach.

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority are a blob. There is a substantial overlap between users and advocates (shared interest in seeing <coin> “go to the moon”)… adding “researchers” here to lend some credibility to the blob is unfair to the researchers who probably make up < 1% (low figure in just tossing out there)… If there is “value to be achieved”, it won’t be achieved by speculators on coin prices…

I think the problem is that, at least in this area, the only people asking for more nuance are bitcoin supporters, and they aren’t open to nuanced reasoning for why people hate bitcoin. “Nuance,” to them, just means letting them win some of the arguments or admitting that some of what they say is not entirely bad. That’s not “nuance,” that’s appeasement.

Bitcoin has existed for about 13 years. Given its environmental impact, it's high time there was value beyond criminal money flow and gambling on exchange rates.

I thought the electricity usage was due to the 'mining' for new crypto, not for the actual blockchain that stores the 'ledger' of transactions.

Mining is what gives legitimacy to the records stored on the blockchain, what allows it to be "trustless". No mining, no blockchain.

They're inextricably linked by design. The "mined" bitcoins are the reward for successfully attaching some transactions to the ledger in a computationally expensive way.

While I agree, I don't think this should be a fair primary reason. Unless you also feel the same about everything else that consumes more electricity than it could. There wouldn't be a concern if all energy was green for example, that should be where the energy hostility should be pointed. Trying to complain about the blockchain and its useage on power is an XY problem for me.

I don't know about any other thing that's literally designed to consume as much electricity as possible.

Consuming energy is a requirement for it to provide its stated benefits. If you're able to conjure the protocol which doesn't require PoW and still maintains the characteristics, you would be welcomed with open arms.

Blockchain != Bitcoin

Thank you for saying what we're all thinking.

The above highlights my point in a sense.

Many chains are already proof of stake, and many others are transitioning, including Ethereum.

Proof of stake only allows rich people to verify transactions, which seems to… contradict the goals of cryptocurrency.

Howso? Those people cannot pervert the actual transaction, they will be slashed, and the money I believe goes to the node who proves them wrong, as incentive (don't quote me). It remains completely decentralized and effectively ungovernable, which I believe is the primary goal of cryptocurrency. I don't think it was ever meant to address the "rich get richer" effect.

Also, the practical upshot of the previous dynamic was that only people who could afford thousands of GPUs/ASICs/FPGAs could verify transactions, so it was basically the same effect with more steps.

Stellar doesn't do this.

You don't use a wash dryer I assume. Or Christmas lights? Plugged out all standby appliances? Never drive a car? Working without a laptop?

Comparing energy usage of a global system with the total energy usage of a country is absurd, and people doing it should feel ashamed they didnt rationally think about what they said/wrote.

The fundamental difference between (proof-of-work) blockchains and the examples that you mentioned is that (pow) blockchains not only must consume ever increasing amounts of electricity by their very design, but they also incentivise doing so as much as possible, the only limit being whether you can afford it.

Let's take Bitcoin for instance. I'm pretty sure that the electricity required to perform one single BTC transaction has grown by multiple orders of magnitude since Bitcoin first appeared, regardless of the possible efficiency improvements in GPUs or ASICs, and will continue to grow—hence, profitability will always scale linearly with the willingness and capability to waste.

On the other hand, dryers, Christmas lights, appliances, cars and laptops etc. have, if anything, all become more energy-efficient in the past decade, being able to perform the same funcion or better while using less power. On top of that, there's only so much washing you want to dry, or so many places you want to drive to—you don't want to indefinitely scale up the size of your dryer, or the number of cars you drive. And if you were to find a reason to scale up either of them, it would be because there is a business opportunity in providing a material service to customers, either laundry or transport. In that case, your profitability would be limited by how many people want their clothes dried or to be driven somewhere, and not just by how big you can afford the dryer or how many cars you can accumulate.

How about we compare the energy usage of a single transaction against the entire home electricity costs of a two-person household, then?

A single bitcoin transaction uses more electricity than my apartment does in two months (at least during the spring).

A dish washing machine is useful. A clothes washing machine is useful. Christmas lights help celebrate a tradition that's important to billions of people, some of whom see deep religious meaning it. Cars are useful. Laptops are useful. As such, none of these things can be compared to blockchain. You're making an invalid comparison. To take one use case of blockchain, Bitcoin debuted in 2009. It's been 13 years, about half the age of the commercial Web. If blockchain was going to lead to something useful, then that would have happened already. Its failure to find a use case suggests that this is pure hype.

It is absurd, but such absurdity is needed to make the energy waste relatable.

You could compare a blockchain transaction's energy use to that of a credit card payment. But that would not convey the scale difference.